Temporal Standards in Police Use-of-Force Analysis

Facts of the Case

On April 28, 2016, Officer Roberto Felix, Jr. stopped Ashtian Barnes, a 24-year-old Black man in Houston, Texas, for unpaid tolls. When Mr. Barnes was unable to produce a driver’s license, he told the officer that he might have some identification in the trunk of the car. Officer Felix asked Mr. Barnes to open the trunk from his seat, which he did while turning off the ignition. Officer Felix, with his right hand on his holster, then told Mr. Barnes to exit the vehicle, but Mr. Barnes opened the door and started the ignition. Officer Felix unholstered his gun, stepped onto the door sill as the car moved forward, and shouted twice at Mr. Barnes not to move. With no visibility into the car since his head was above the roof, Officer Felix fired two fatal shots inside the vehicle. Two seconds passed between Officer Felix stepping onto the door sill and firing the first shot.

Mr. Barnes’s mother sued Officer Felix on her deceased son’s behalf under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (2017), alleging excessive use of force. The district court granted summary judgment to Officer Felix, explaining that Mrs. Barnes needed to show that his use of force was “objectively unreasonable.” The court noted that the reasonableness inquiry considers various circumstances in excessive force cases, but when deadly force is used, a court can ask only about the situation existing “at the moment of the threat” that sparked the fatal shooting, as described in Rockwell v. Brown, 664 F.3d 985 (5th Cir. 2011), p 991). In this case, the court identified that moment as “the two seconds before Felix fired his first shot,” when he was standing on the door sill of a moving vehicle (Barnes v. Felix, 532 F. Supp. 3d 463 (S.D. Tex. 2021), p 471). The court found that an officer could reasonably consider himself at risk of serious harm in that instance, and that fact alone concluded the court’s analysis. The court expressed concern that this narrow view limited its ability to fully assess the reasonableness of the situation but said it was bound by the Fifth Circuit’s precedent to evaluate only the moment Officer Felix was hanging on Mr. Barnes’s moving vehicle.

Mrs. Barnes appealed. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court’s decision, citing similar concerns regarding the scope of inquiry but explaining that it was also bound by “this Circuit’s moment of threat doctrine” (Barnes v. Felix, 91 F. 4th 393 (5th Cir. 2024), p 397). In a concurring opinion, Judge Higginbotham acknowledged that the Fifth Circuit’s moment-of-threat doctrine was at odds with the U.S. Supreme Court’s directive to assess the reasonableness of the use of force by examining the totality of circumstances.

Mrs. Barnes appealed the Fifth Circuit’s decision, and the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari in October 2024.

Ruling and Reasoning

Excessive force claims are evaluated under the Fourth Amendment, which focuses on objective reasonableness. The main question is whether a reasonable officer would view the use of force as justified, considering both the individual’s and the government’s interests. In a unanimous opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court explained that assessing the reasonableness of police force involves considering the “totality of the circumstances,” citing Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985), p 9.

Although the lower courts cited the moment-of-threat ruling as the foundation of their decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that there is no time limit on the totality of circumstances analysis. The Court stated that, although the moment of force is crucial, earlier events (e.g., history of interactions, past circumstances) may influence how a reasonable officer would interpret and respond to later ones. The Court cited previous legal decisions, including Plumhoff v. Rickard, 572 U.S. 765 (2014), for the position on the totality of circumstances to assess reasonableness and stated that courts must evaluate all relevant facts known to the officer at that moment. The Court ruled that the lower courts erred by considering only the final two seconds before the shooting, stating, “A court deciding a use-of-force case cannot review the totality of the circumstances if it has put on chronological blinders” (Barnes, p 1359).

Officer Felix argued that the moment-of-threat doctrine allowed courts to consider many facts and circumstances before the shooting and only prevented analysis of whether the officer’s earlier actions led to the need for deadly force, but the Court disagreed. The Court found that the lower courts clearly limited their analyses to the final two seconds, which contradicted the required totality-of-the-circumstances approach. The Court also pointed to another previous case in which the Fifth Circuit had “narrowed” the totality-of-the-circumstances inquiry with Harris v. Serpas, 745 F.3d 767 (5th Cir. 2014).

Justice Kavanaugh, joined by Justices Thomas, Alito, and Barrett, filed a concurring opinion and emphasized that an officer’s use of force during a traffic stop must be evaluated under the totality of the circumstances, especially when a driver flees. The concurrence highlighted the inherent danger of traffic stops for police officers, citing historical and recent fatal encounters, and agreed that an analysis of reasonableness must balance individual rights against governmental interests. The justices warned against using hindsight to second-guess officers’ decisions and stressed that courts should respect the threats and pressures officers face when they must make split-second decisions in real time.

The Court did not address the separate question of whether an officer’s own conduct in creating danger factors into the reasonableness analysis, stating that the question presented was about timing alone.

The Court thus vacated and remanded the appeals court judgment for further proceedings, consistent with its earlier decision in Tennessee v. Garner.